BioLamina and Novo Nordisk Partner to Advance Stem Cell Based Therapies for Three Common Medical Conditions

BioLamina and collaborators have partnered with Novo Nordisk A/S (Novo Nordisk), a Danish multinational pharmaceutical company, allowing Novo Nordisk to develop novel stem cell based therapies based on Biolaminins, human recombinant laminin cell culture matrices, developed and produced by BioLamina.

Novo Nordisk have announced today that they are increasing their commitment to cell therapies, including areas outside of diabetes. The three cell therapy projects they have licensed are all based on BioLamina technology. These projects aim to treat Parkinson's disease, heart failure and loss of vision, all severe chronic conditions.

Malin Parmar's research group at Lund University and Karl Tryggvason's research group at Duke-NUS in Singapore have developed potential cell therapies based on BioLamina's unique Biolaminin matrices. Both groups have signed research and potential licensing agreements with Novo Nordisk with the aim to develop these projects further together with Novo Nordisk, enabling a translation of cell therapy pre-clinical studies, to clinical trials and eventually towards patient treatments.

The timing for these licensing agreements coincides well with the launch of BioLamina's first cell therapy grade product a couple of weeks ago, assuring cell therapy developers worldwide that Biolamina's products can be used all the way from the bench to bedside. There is an ongoing trend that researchers using embryonic stem cell or induced pluripotent based protocols want to use BioLamina products in their product development to make their processes more robust and reproducible.

"There is a high demand for BioLamina's products in the development of safe and robust cell-based therapies," says Kristian Tryggvason, CEO for BioLamina, and continues "It is really intriguing to see how Biolaminins are being part of building new therapies and can help contribute treating many people in the future."

ABOUT BIOLAMINA AB

BioLamina commercializes innovations based on research from the Karl Tryggvason laboratory at Karolinska Institute and Duke-NUS solving technical problems within culturing of embryonic stem cells and other types of primary cells. Many of the products manufactured and sold by BioLamina are based on human recombinant proteins called laminins. The laminins provide cells with an environment mimicking their natural location in the cell culture dish. Different laminin isoforms are expressed in different tissues in the body, hence many different cell types can thrive on laminins. Laminins and other innovations together solve many of the technical problems in research such as reproducibility and low cell quality and therefore help the development of new cell therapies. BioLamina was founded in 2009.

Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with 95 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care. This heritage has given us experience and capabilities that also enable us to help people defeat obesity, haemophilia, growth disorders and other serious chronic diseases. Headquartered in Denmark, Novo Nordisk employs approximately 42,700 people in 79 countries and markets its products in more than 170 countries.